SOURCE: "The Humor of the Self-Kidder," in Saturday Review of Literature, Vol. XXIII, No. 22, March 22, 1941, p. 5.

In the following essay, White praises Exit Laughing as a peculiarly American autobiography.

This book [Exit Laughing] is only incidentally the "life story" of Irvin S. Cobb. It is an adventure in humorous American humor. Taking it by and large, the humor in Irvin Cobb's autobiography, which bubbles like eternal Pierian springs on every page, is the humor of the selfkidder. He has a lot of stories about others, but if he laughs at a poor devil, it is only to reveal the fact that Cobb is not superior to the poor devil, but is his brother under the skin.

Mark Twain, at least in his earlier days, was a self-kidder. The travel stories of Mark Twain—Roughing It, A Tramp Abroad, Innocence Abroad, Life on the Mississippi, and his boys' stories...